


Other People

by proxydialogue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Porn Ahoy, Slash, Vague depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 22:29:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/398905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Return fic. It’s a long road from the afterlife back to John Watson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Other People

**Author's Note:**

> I owe scarletjedi my firstborn for betaing this.

Deep down, everyone thinks they are extraordinary. Everyone has secrets. Everyone fears discovery. It is not so much a truth of human nature as it is a condition of it. The human mind is defined by its knowledge of its self, and by its ability to project and infer the thoughts of other minds. The very fear that makes people believe they are the exception is what defines them as common. 

By virtue of this truth, the real difference between Sherlock and other people was not that he was a genius. Or that he was cold-hearted (if indeed he was). Or that he sometimes kept human viscera in his fridge. Or even that he was the only consulting detective in the world.

The difference between Sherlock and other people was that Sherlock was ordinary and he knew it. If he was more intelligent or more observant than his neighbors or his family or all of Scotland yard, it was only because he happened to fall ahead of the average on a curve of certain qualities. In his basic makeup, in his humanness, Sherlock was no more noteworthy than the next lump of slowly decomposing flesh on the planet. Sherlock had secrets he kept and measures he took to keep his secrets safe and even the details of his secrets were banal and cliché and boring. 

If there was any practical distinction between Sherlock and the so-called ‘average man’, it was that Sherlock was an exceptional liar and always had been. He’d used that ability convince everyone that he was Sherlock Holmes the detective. Sherlock Holmes the sociopath. Sherlock Holmes the man without a heart. He’d used it to convince a lot of people of a lot of things. 

At the apex of his career, he convinced a madman that he was the devil. It was a moment he could look back on with pride indeed: the soft eyes of a psychopath smiling up at him, the red mouth weeping—and then the splatter of blood and bone and tissue. _Bang_ , he’d thought and his chest had been pounding. His ears had been ringing. _You’re dead_. 

And that was his last convincing lie. Stand on a rooftop and mix in bits of the truth (people would swallow it easier that way, mix in the truth with the lie). Sherlock Holmes was a fraud. Sherlock Holmes was a liar. Tell your best friend you wrote your life like a mystery novel and then jump from the roof, the sound of the bullet still echoing in your ears. _Bang_.

Sherlock Holmes was dead. 

Sherlock could fool anyone. It wasn’t hard. People were always willing to be deceived.

The trick was believing it yourself.

***

Sherlock spent half of his afterlife in France as a man without a name. After the dive and the fall and the harrowing ordeal of listening to John pleading his name while he was wheeled away on a gurney Sherlock just didn’t have the will to find other people to lie to. His body was broken (dislocated shoulder, fractured scapula, torn patella tendon, concussion) and he was homesick.

One of Sherlock’s secrets was that he’d never had a home until John Watson. 

Moriarty was dead but Sherlock couldn’t go back to John, back home, until Moriarty’s _people_ were dead too. 

So he lay in bed most days and let himself heal. When summer came he opened the window and listened to the sound of people speaking his grandmother’s language in the street. And sometimes the sun would come in, or the rain. He didn’t bother to stop either. He welcomed them, driving and warm or whispering and cool across his skin. A reminder that the last lie was only that, and he was still alive. He would turn on his side to stare out the window, wonder what kind of weather London was having. 

Eventually, on some mornings, he started going out again. He didn’t do much. He took walks and re-educated himself in the pedestrian art of grocery runs. Other mornings it seemed like nothing could be worth the effort it took to peel the sheets off the sweat on his skin. On those days it would take him an hour, sometimes longer, just to move between the bed and the bathroom.

It would take him that long to talk himself into getting the hell up. Closing his eyes, he would imagine his mother standing in the doorway, smiling and calling him pet names. 

_Time for the “little sir” to wake up. Will my scholar be eating breakfast this morning?_

(No to both. He hadn’t slept well. Up late reading, toying with father’s chemistry set, writing hateful notes in the margins of the poetry his teachers made him learn.)

_Out of bed anyway, darling_. 

(Yes. Alright.) 

Sherlock kept a low profile. . He kept his face out of the photographs of tourists and the eyes of security cameras. He began collecting newspapers, scanning them first for John’s name, and then scouring them through for hints of the spider’s web. The important articles (never about actual crime, Moriarty’s people were too clever for that, but usually the secondary side effects dominoing up from the underground) he clipped out and kept in between the pages of unimportant books: _Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, L'âge de raison, En attendant Godot._

Sherlock checked the blog periodically (everyday, twice a day, heart in his mouth) and waited. It was like standing blindfolded before a firing line that never fired. Silence for months. He had waited a year before the final story appeared. Before the story _finally_ appeared. Then, at two o’clock in the morning as winter began, while Sherlock was stretched out on his mattress, he saw the light cast from the screen of his laptop shift across the floor as the page updated itself and a new entry appeared. He smacked his knee off the wall rolling over to grab the computer. 

_The Reichenbach Fall_.

Sherlock pulled the computer into his lap and leaned his back against the wall. He turned off his bedside lamp and pulled all the shades closed. He sat in the dark and read all about John Watson’s anger and his disbelief and his broken heart. And, in a tiny one room flat in Paris, Sherlock Holmes (who had never really been Sherlock Holmes anyway, but just a young man pretending he was a storybook character) bent over his keyboard and covered his mouth so that no one would hear the sound of his tears through the thin walls. 

The next day he left Paris and went further abroad. He went to Dengfeng and to Budapest. He spoke with strangers and learned new things. In the southern province of Taiwan he met an old man who kept bees and stayed there for three weeks. He learned how to hunt in Sweden. He spent a good deal of time in Bucharest, thinking about devils.

***

Everyone wants to be seen. It’s part of the human desire for validation. _Here I am, I matter. Look at how extraordinary I can be_. People scurry through all the minutes of their lives and imagine that they are doing ordinary things in amazing new ways. People are really all the same.

For John, that was a comforting thought. John didn’t want recognition anymore. He was sick of people pointing him out in cafés or sending him emails, or calling on Mrs. Hudson and asking after “The blogger of Sherlock Holmes.” They always had the same, idiotic questions. _Do you miss him? Did you ever suspect? How does it feel to know you were lied to for so long?_

No comment. John Watson knew a thing or damn two about lies. For instance, if you don’t feed them they die. And he wasn’t going to feed this…this _thing_ unleashed by Moriarty. Although he couldn’t starve it, not alone, he sure as fuck wasn’t going to play along. 

John was just an ordinary bloke. He was a guy that went drinking with his buddies and prayed for weekends.

And if there was anything else to John, anything deeper or darker or grander, no one needed to know about it. 

Certainly not him.

***

By the time Sherlock returned to London he’d nearly forgotten how to be Sherlock Holmes. He was just sick of being dead while John was alive and tired of walking the world while John was in England. It had been two years and nine months since they’d buried him. And it was still not safe for him to return.

Certain men had long memories, and for a dead man, Moriarty had longer arms yet. 

But Sherlock was worn out. And he wanted to be at home. And the time was coming. The rumors were that certain pawns were scattering, and the newspapers showed signs that certain plans were changing. Moriarty’s guns were picking themselves up and moving on. 

Sherlock didn’t wait. He moved. He began the game, flying like a shadow out of Bucharest on a midnight flight to England. His fingers tapping as he waited in line at the arrival gate at Heathrow, Sherlock counted to three. 

A man in Russia. A woman in India. And a monster who’d stayed in London. 

Sherlock only came back to find the threads, but when his feet hit the streets he knew he couldn’t leave again without seeing John. Sherlock Holmes could have, perhaps, but Sherlock Holmes was a different man (a dead man, for that matter) and Sherlock wasn’t a sociopath or a machine or any of the other absurd things he’d wanted to be for so long. 

Sherlock waited for dusk and walked down John’s street.

John owned a small house now. He’d established himself as a respectable medical man with an eccentric past and a hobby that involved consulting for the police on homicides. He was living on his own (the personal blog he’d set up for his friends and family hadn’t mentioned anything about a girlfriend. There were no saccharine love metaphors lacing the posts.) and he was still alone. _Let him still be alone_. 

The house looked exactly like a house should look. There was a pointless little stonewall and a rock garden in the back yard. A bird feeder jammed in the grass and flowerboxes in the windows (though there were no flowers, just one little black jumping spider making her home). Sherlock passed by slowly, hands in his pockets and back hunched to hide his height. The kitchen light was on and John was inside, watching the kettle boil while he brushed his teeth. 

There was only one cup on the counter. 

Sherlock stopped and pretended he was watching the sparrows at the feeder, relief pounding in his chest. He’d spent three years without a friend because he couldn’t risk discovery, hiding and running before anyone could think to chase, waiting for the right opportunity to arise. Three years praying to a God he didn’t believe in that John was the sort of man who would wait for a miracle he knew was never going to come. Every step between China and Hungary and Taiwan, Sherlock had been hoping that John was still the kind of man who only needed one cup for tea. 

And there he was. Still wearing the same sweaters. Still keeping enough PG Tips in the house to caffeinate an army. Still just as broken as he’d been the day he lost everything. 

Inside the house John moved out of the frame of the window. Sherlock forced his legs to move again. The streetlights were coming on. _You’ve seen him. Let it go_. 

_There’s a game to be played_. 

And he didn’t have a choice. He could win, or he could stay lost forever. 

Sherlock found a place to hole up while he went looking for the footsteps to Russia.

***

Sherlock _did_ play the game. He picked up the rules and the moves as if he’d never left off. He stepped through London just as easily as he ever had, fingers looking for the right strings, ears listening for the right names. But every night he ended up back at the same place.

Sherlock liked walking. Though “wandering” was perhaps a better word. He liked that a person who wandered enough could wander anywhere and still be reasonably sure of where he was going. 

One of Sherlock’s secrets was that the more he wandered, the more he realized all his roads led to John. 

One night he passed the house and saw six empty beer bottles on the living room coffee table. The television was still on but the couch was empty and all the lights were out. 

Sherlock happened to know (because he knew John) that there was a spare key to the backdoor hidden beneath the ceramic frog in the garden. And Sherlock knew from past experience that John slept heavy as mountains after drinking. And Sherlock knew that if he died in Russia there would never be another chance. 

So he let himself in. 

The house smelled like tea and the living room smelled faintly of gun oil. The hallway, Sherlock was surprised to find, smelled of lavender vanilla (surprised until he passed the bathroom and saw Mrs. Hudson’s favorite brand of air-freshener was the source of the smell. And there where other signs too, around the house, that she’d been checking in on John). The bedroom smelled like laundry. 

And John was inside, snoring like a rusted canon. He’d kicked off his jeans (discarded, flat legs in a running gesture on the rug) and was sleeping in a t-shirt and rumpled boxers. The blankets were bunched and tangled underneath him because he’d fallen asleep before covering himself. John was sprawled diagonally across the mattress, face buried in his pillow, the lines of his spine and shoulder blades clearly defined by the dim light.

Sherlock stood in the doorway with the glow of the hall nightlight behind him. If John woke up he wouldn’t see anything but a dark shape, just a faceless voyeur slipping away. 

Sherlock stayed for a few minutes, watching John dream. He crossed his arms tightly across his chest and leaned against the doorframe, fighting back the impulse to enter. He wanted to kneel at John’s side and brush a hand across his forehead, bend down and whisper “hello” in his ear. Or wake him up and say “goodbye”. Properly this time. No magic tricks or cheats. 

Another secret of Sherlock’s was that part of his lie was true, he really _didn’t_ have a heart. Not anymore. He used to, years ago. But it had since been taken from him, yanked right out of his chest, actually, by John Watson. Who kept it in the pocket of his dressing gown and the under the soft belly of his tongue and in the palm of his hand, and Sherlock didn’t think he was ever going to get it back. 

Which was maudlin and over-used and unbearably _ordinary_. But it was the truth.

John inhaled with a sound like a rising wind and stirred, turning onto his side so that the light from the open door fell directly on his face. 

Sherlock should have left right then. But the shadows made John’s face look thin and his eyelashes look long. They accented the line of his neck and the light hair on his arms. John sniffed and opened his eyes. 

Sherlock’s pulse thumped in his ears. He slipped silently down the hall and out the door. 

The next day he slipped silently out of London. 

Another truth is that we have no real say over some of the secrets we keep. Which is why we keep them secret. Because we have no power to change them. And because they often have the power to change us instead.

***

There was a ghost in John’s house (it had followed him from Baker Street).

He might have tried to blame it on one too many lunches with Mrs. Hudson, listening her bang on about mediums and tarot cards, but his skin had been itching all afternoon. He found himself getting up during every advert to draw the blinds aside and peer down the street, as if he expected someone to be walking down it. He kept turning around in his seat to check the empty corners, as if he expected someone to be standing there. His leg burned and cramped as it hadn’t in years and more than once he thought he heard his mobile buzzing (only to find that the battery was dead when he went to check it). 

There was only one person who had any reason to be haunting John now.

Around nine, John gave up on reality and broke out the beer. He sat on his sofa with the telly on and began swimming the road to false oblivion. Whenever a stray thought or the shape of Sherlock’s name clouded his vision he turned up the volume a little bit more and leaned closer to the screen to drown it out. When that didn’t work he stopped drinking the beer like beer and started drinking it like water. It was a jolly good thing he didn’t live in a flat anymore. 

By the time he abandoned the living room Colin Firth was screaming his soft sweet nothings at Elizabeth Bennett and John was floating in apathy. He struggled with the remote for silence and then wobbled down the hall to his bedroom. All the lights were out, except for the nightlight in the hall, because John never bothered to turn that off. He kicked off his pants and crawled to his mattress, planning to turn into a stone until morning. Or let the river darkness drown him, he didn’t much care. He wanted to sink. And be still. And know nothing. 

But somehow sleep eluded him. And instead of sinking he tossed around on the surface, and a memory of sand made the back of his knees itch like crazy. He rocked between confusing dreams of Afghanistan and the Grimpen minefield and fuzzy moments of near lucidity, waking up for noises that hadn’t happened. John would force himself to lie still and then wake again flailing, in a panic, snapping his head around to check his open closet and the doorway for ghosts. 

Until at last he opened his eyes to see the last flicker of a shadow retreating down the hallway. 

John froze. He had been reeling all night, but now the river settled, and he was focused. John sat up slowly and listened. He wished he could also stop the racket of his heart, drumming in his ears and making certainty impossible. John stared at the wall and strained, waiting for the sound of the door, or even a window squeaking shut. 

One tiny creak, it might have been a footstep or the house settling, but not another sound outside of himself. 

He jumped out of bed and stumbled across the floor. He had to catch himself on the wavering doorframe. The river was tossing again and the entire room rolled with it. John gripped the wood molding and took deep, steadying breaths. 

He thought he could smell aftershave. 

John lurched into the hallway, (“Sh—”) and looked down the narrow tunnel to the rest of his empty house. 

He did an unsteady circuit, palms trailing against the walls and the furniture, and found nothing. Not a stray button on the floor or a picture frame out of place. 

John didn’t bother to make it back to his bed. He sat down in the hall where the phantom scent lingered and put his head between his knees. He closed his eyes and dug his toes into the carpet and waited for his mind to stop playing games with him. 

They said smell was the sense linked most to memory. John inhaled and felt the chill in Sherlock’s fingers and the bite of the handcuffs. He could smell the laundry scent of Sherlock’s coat and the dull tang of blood. The slight must of ash and cold sidewalk. 

Then the interruption of other perfumes and colognes, rough hands pulling him away. Flashing lights. 

_I was so alone. And I owe you so much._

_Come back, goddamn you_.

***

Russia was cold.

Russia was big. 

And it was a dangerous place to get wet. A terrible place to take a swim. Worse place to fall into a river. 

Place that cold; water that deep, you might get stuck under the ice and drown. They might not find your body ‘till June when the thaw finally came. They might never find you at all if you sank deep enough. If your bones froze solid. 

And if you were an invisible man, the kind of man without a face or a real name or people to go home to, it might be that no one would ever even know to go looking. 

The maid probably had a fright though, Sherlock thought idly as he stuck his frozen hands in his pockets. Dead men tell no tales. But their suitcases…the kind of _souvenirs_ they took with them, the kind of _utensils_ they packed, the photographs they kept, those things were a clear biography. 

It was massively out of his way, but Sherlock went back to London before continuing to India. He only spent one night, but he had to see what kind of ripples were making their way through the underground. It was imperative he make sure none of those ripples where washing John Watson’s name around.

***

The next time John was much more careful. When the shadow from the hallway fell across his face he surfaced deliberately from the tedium of his nightmares. He didn’t move and he didn’t make a sound. He kept his breathing deep and even, opened his eyes slowly.

The figure in his doorway was tall and dark and faceless. But John’s heart didn’t even skip. Thin sloped shoulders, un-kept halo of hair and the wings of a high collar. John would have recognized the bastard’s silhouette anywhere. He wasn’t surprised. He’d known. 

And some desperate, sadistic part of him had been waiting for it. John had never been a superstitious man, but there was always time to learn.

***

India was hot. India was loud. And Sherlock was looking for a silent woman.

 _In Jaipur_ , said the whispers. _She’s in Jaipur_. In Jaipur where so many of the woman were silent anyway. That’s where she was. 

_Clever_.

***

“How much did you have to drink last night?” Harry’s asked while John put the dishes away. Her voice was tinny and distant through John’s crap speakerphone. His mobile was sitting on the counter top. But, he considered, it could just as easily be someplace else. Like the yard or the bin. Or the bottom of a river.

“How much did you have to drink?” _Harry_ asked _him_. He ignored the question. 

“Do you believe in Heaven?” he asked instead, standing on this tiptoes to shove a mixing bowl onto the top shelf of his cupboard. Harry was quiet for a minute and John could hear her thinking through all the things she thought she couldn’t say: _Are you ever going to get over him? Have you been to see your shrink? Are you okay?_

“I don’t know,” she answered after a minute. “Never gave it much thought.” 

Neither had he. In fact, for most of his life John had treated religion like conversations about his bowel movements. They embarrassed him and unless they were causing him hospitalization or worse they didn’t bear thinking or speaking about. But belief was different. Belief was not religion and it was important.

“Don’t they teach you that kind of tosh at your meetings?” he asked. “I’ve read the books. There’s a whole step about accepting a higher power.” 

Recently, John had been running out of things to believe in. And he was starting to wonder if it wasn’t better to believe a pretty lie than a terrible truth. He didn’t even care if that made him a coward. It was a stigma he was willing to wear, if it meant he could start sleeping again at night. 

“Sort of. But it doesn’t have to be God. It could be anything. A government. A country. Sod’s Law.” 

“Mycroft,” John muttered. 

“What?” 

“Nothing. What do you believe?” _Do you believe my best friend was really a fraud?_ He didn’t ask that. 

“I believe that Margaret Thatcher is a six foot lizard in a person suit and I believe in Hell,” answered Harry.

“Why hell?”

“Because I’ve been there.” 

And people said John was the egomaniac. Kids dying in civil wars and countries imploding under their own economies until it was so bad the rats had nothing to eat and Harry Watson, failed marriage-functioning alcoholic, had been to hell. 

“Why do you ask?” Harry pressed. John tried to scoop up a handful of clean butter knives and fumbled them all over the floor. They crashed and scattered. He swore and bent over to pick them up. 

“I think I’m being haunted,” he said. He dumped the knives back into the sink. 

“Well that’s not too surprising, I guess,” said Harry. “Life like yours.”

***

India was hot.

India was loud. 

And the mosquitoes were really a problem for foreigners. You had to be careful you had all your inoculations; you had to know the ground rules. Don’t drink the water. Don’t eat the restaurant food (it’s washed with the water). A place like Jaipur you had to be careful, it was such a bustling, deafening place. 

The kind of place where, so many people shouting, so many travelers getting sick, the panicked cries of a silent woman might go overlooked. In Jaipur, where things like Malaria and Yellow Fever weren’t just associated with dates in history books, there might not be anyone listening closely enough to hear the word “poison” dripping off a woman’s fevered lips. And even if they did, they would probably write it off as delirium anyway. 

Or simply not care. 

Sherlock didn’t stick around to find out what they did with the unclaimed bodies of women with no passports.

***

Yeah, John had a secret.

It wasn’t a very good secret in that he was fairly certain that everyone who knew him or had met him for longer than twenty seconds together knew about it, but it was still something he never said out loud.

Let it first be known that John was _not_ secretly gay. He really did like women. They were soft and sweet and they smelled nice. However, the fact that by some cruel twist of fate the person John loved most in the world did not come standard with hair that smelled of strawberry vanilla or a decent pair of breasts was a mere inconvenience and not a deal breaker. What had broken the deal, what had broken _everything_ , had been the idiot jumping from the roof of a seven-story building, killing himself and leaving John behind. 

The real secret wasn’t that John had been in love with another man. It was that, thanks to Sherlock, he was _still_ in love and it was with a goddamn memory and John knew bloody fucking well that he was never going to fall in love again. And all those whispers he gave to other people, those little touches and brushes, didn’t mean a thing. They were steps to a dance he couldn’t even hear the music to anymore.

***

London was elegant.

London was tangled. 

And it was a place built for lies. The sort of place where demons were confused with angels and ordinary people were confused with demons. The sort of place where you didn’t need morality, just a charming smile, a good story, and people would trust you. 

Colonel Sebastian Moran was not a hard man to find. He was in the phone book. He was in the news. 

A war hero, a philanthropist; he’d made his name three years ago after posthumously clearing the name of Richard Brook for good. Not that there had been any actual legal weight behind the trial (it had been nothing more than a gaudy, commercialized ritual televised to give a bored country a martyr to cry over). Moran had been the defense. He’d presented the evidence on national television before a real judge.

“Because fairy tales aren’t real,” Moran had concluded over the broadcast, fingers resting on his notes as he stared into a television camera, “but evil men are. And their lies are real. And the lives they ruin are real. But even the best lies, the lies we might _want_ to believe, can’t destroy the truth. And the truth is a matter of public record in this case. Richard Brook was a storyteller. So was Sherlock Holmes.” A tawdry pause. “I’ll let you decide who told the real story.” 

A “jury” of texting viewers had, almost unanimously, acquitted Richard Brook of the charge of being Moriarty. 

Moran was small news now. He had stepped out of the spotlight, but his name had been made. A few small exclusives in the Metro now and then (‘Moran has Rapist Condemned’, ‘Children’s Shelter Saved’) kept him in the back of the public mind. He was safe in the subconscious hearts of London.

If there were deaths or disappearances, they could never be linked to Moran. The young psychiatrist found swinging from a bridge was depressed. Her girlfriend, found raving about broken eyeglasses and missing files, was psychotic. She must have lost her mind out of grief. The fire in Brentwood, three burned alive, was a tragic accident. The missing Carbuncle, a mystery. 

London was the perfect bed for a man like Moran. He was untouchable, because in the London he’d built Sherlock Holmes could never touch him. If he’d been alive, Holmes could never have gotten close. 

But maybe his ghost could.

***

John wasn’t stupid enough to think that he might be the one guy who would get to live a happily-ever-almost. He was a doctor and he’d been a soldier. There was such a thing a delayed PTSD and maybe there was even such a thing as ghosts. He was screwed either way. He’d never fancied himself the type to have a psychotic breakdown, but then no one ever does and half of those who do never believe they’re having one anyway. John was willing to believe it, he was willing to believe _something_ , the problem was telling which was real, the madness or the ghost.

And there was always a chance both were real. 

He was loosing more sleep than ever. 

John slept with the bedroom door wide open. He lay awake every night, turned on his side and staring at the empty, open space of the doorway. He just waited. And wanted. And sometimes wondered, without much conviction, if it wouldn’t be better to have an exorcism done? Mrs. Hudson would know a guy and even if it didn’t bring John peace it would at least bring him some silence. 

The digital clock on his night stand crunched through the minutes, chewed them slowly to pieces and spat them back out as little red lines and numbers. John was dozing off at last (with the time burned on the back of his eyelids) when a rustle and a sigh made his eyes snap back open. 

The ghost was there. Tall and graceful, leaning against the doorframe. The dark shape, tonight, looked hunch and exhausted. John made no effort to hide his stare and the ghost made no attempt to run away. 

John couldn’t see the eyes, but he could feel them, running over his aging body and his belly. His bare legs and arms. The shadows on his face. 

Then there was a sound from the other side. John’s heart froze in his chest, and his muscles contracted in a rush of adrenaline. He clutched the bed sheets.

Throat tight, John waited. As he’d always done. 

At length there were words: “I want to come home,” said the voice of the ghost. He sounded exactly like Sherlock, only sadder. It just a whisper, so soft it might have been spoken from the far side of bulletproofed glass or a thick, heavy curtain. John swallowed and forced his fingers to relax. 

“Then come home,” he said and his heart began to beat again. But he must have blinked, or been dreaming, because like that the ghost was gone.

***

On his last night impersonating a dead man, Sherlock dressed himself all in black and wrapped his favorite scarf around his neck. He stopped before donning his coat and looked at himself in the mirror of his hotel room, running his fingers over the soft cotton that hid his windpipe and his vulnerability. If tied properly the scarf was also just long enough to swing from. Its fibers might even be strong enough to hold a twitching, gallows body.

How many years had he been wearing it? 

_For one more night then_. 

He tucked John’s revolver in his pocket (it had taken him ten full minutes to find it last night, and he could only hope that John wouldn’t notice its absence until Sherlock could return it). He straightened his shoulders. He stuck out his chin and looked down his nose at his reflection. 

Not good enough. He still only looked like Sherlock. There was something too soft in his eyes and around his mouth. 

“John,” he whispered and rubbed his eyes. 

Sherlock was out of practice. Dressing one’s self up as a sociopath was not like riding a bike. It required concentration and conviction and Sherlock was exhausted. It had to begin in his bones, with his foundations. That was the basis of all good lies. Belief. 

He had to believe he was Sherlock Holmes, or nearly believe it anyway. But he wasn’t, and never had been. 

_You got close though_. 

And look at the places it had taken him. How much good it had done?

_Moriarty is dead. You killed him_. 

_And then I killed Sherlock Holmes_ , so who was left now? 

Whoever it was, he was running out of time. Sherlock drew the curtains and turned off the light. He left the room dark and sterile. 

Though the layout of the streets never changed, London was the sort of city that writhed at night. Graffiti, stolen street signs, suddenly empty or boarded up windows creating gaps like knocked out teeth. People lived in London as though it was a metropolis instead of the belly of a snake but Sherlock knew better. He walked close enough to the walls to stay hidden and close enough to the lamps to be safe from the other hidden things. 

Down into the rotting neighborhoods and back up again to the white and glass buildings with a gun in his pocket. The stars were hidden behind the light pollution. Sherlock walked with a changing pace, racking his mind, searching desperately for purchase and a mask to put on. By the time he reached the houses of the rich men (defined not by their souls or their shades of gray, but by the figures in their bank accounts) he’d come to the conclusion that, actually, it didn’t matter who’s face he wore. 

Sherlock didn’t really plan on a face-to-face confrontation. He hadn’t come to be a hero.

***

John sat on his couch drinking coffee (the tea wasn’t strong enough) and thinking. He leaned forward, head hanging down. On the floor, between his feet, was an empty shoebox. He stared into it like it was a crystal ball.

His gun had been in there. It was gone now. 

John wasn’t being haunted. He wasn’t losing his mind. He’d been made a victim—somehow, again—by the one person he’d convinced himself he could trust. One last lie for his benefit, and he’d been completely taken in. 

John wasn’t the sort of person to waste time trying to re-evaluate the last three years of his life. Nothing good could come of that, just more things to hold against the bastard. But he didn’t appreciate having his decisions made for him. And, like anyone, John really didn’t like being made into a fool. 

But then, this was nothing less than he’d asked for. He’d begged Sherlock for a miracle. It was only now, having gotten his wish, that John was realizing what the implications of the miracle were. 

Sherlock had been willing to leave him in the dark, for three years. He’d been _capable_ of it. And it meant that Sherlock didn’t need John after all. It meant—well it meant a goddamn lot of things and none of them were okay. 

Of course John was pissed. Anyone half in possession of their sanity would be pissed. 

But John’s traitorous, love-sick alter ego (the blogger, the idiot he’d been back then) was also buzzing with excitement and relief. And, pissed as he was, John was sucking air into his lungs and pushing it out again, effortlessly. And for the first time in three years it didn’t feel like he was trying to pull oxygen out of an atmosphere of water.

***

Sherlock was long gone by the time the police arrived. He was on the streets and walking, following any one of them, all of them, it didn’t matter, just walking and walking, hands in his pockets, until he got back to John Watson.

***

At two fifty three a.m. John’s back door open and closed, letting in a wisp of night air. His teacup was empty except for the last black swills of his coffee. John looked up into the blank screen of his tv and saw Sherlock walk into his living room.

He looked, _God_ , he looked like a bloody ghost. He was white and skinny and he walked like he was afraid he might fall through the floor. 

Sherlock met John’s eyes through the television screen and took his hands out of his pockets. 

John had planned a thousand words in the last few hours for this moment. A few of them were soft and sweet, but most of them were hard and angry. All of them evaporated. His mouth was full of rocks and desert air. 

Well, one word was left, but he didn’t have the courage to say it. There was still that chance that he would look down into the shoebox and the gun would be there after all. And when he looked back up Sherlock would fade back into the wall and be nothing more than the shadow of a coat rack. So John swallowed and curled his fingers over his knees and silently mouth Sherlock’s name. 

His own name bounced back to him, a sharp and solid sound that broke the distance between them in half. 

“John.” 

Sherlock crossed them room and John turned around, rising onto his knees and bracing himself against the back of the couch. The couch itself almost went over, rocked back with his weight, but Sherlock was there and he braced it against his hips and caught John by the shoulders, holding him up. John could tell by the pinch in Sherlock’s forehead that he’d had things he was going to say too. But there was no time. There was too much time. 

Three, o’four in the morning, according to the clock on the wall. John reached up and grabbed Sherlock’s face, chilled with the wind and pale with fatigue, to pull him down. Still three, o’four when Sherlock stopped, lips a butterfly’s beat away from John’s, and, sliding his hands up John’s arms to his neck, said: “I’m not what you think I am.” 

Three, o’five when John crashed into him, heedless of the warning, all his bitterness and his anger forgotten because Sherlock was in his house and in his life and he needed that first kiss like it was oxygen and he was still drowning. 

John held Sherlock still, maybe for an instant, maybe for a lifetime, until everything slotted into place and the scent of nighttime and gun powder and Sherlock’s favorite shampoo filled John’s lungs and he could form a thought at last: _It’s him_. 

Sherlock inhaled, his palm sweeping up to cradle the back of John’s skull. And though his face was cold his lips were warm. Sherlock brushed careful touches and gentle hands over John’s shoulders and face and John, despite all the times he’d _sworn_ to himself he would never follow the fucker anywhere again, ran his thumbs over Sherlock’s cheekbones and allowed himself to be guided. When Sherlock swayed a little further forward, John bowed his back and gave those inches without a fight. And when Sherlock tipped John’s face to the left with a knuckle under his chin, John allowed it, opening his mouth to Sherlock’s question-less tongue. 

They kissed, slow and kind, two despairing individuals suddenly caught in a patient explanation. And after some long moments of tasting and breathing and clutching, Sherlock’s words caught up with John. 

_I’m not what you think I am_. 

John pulled away with a lush press of his mouth to Sherlock’s and dropped his forehead to Sherlock’s chest. He could feel the steady hammering of the heart within the ribcage, the unsteady gulping of two lungs. 

“You’re not dead,” John mumbled. He wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s torso and fisted his hands in Sherlock’s back and gave up on things like pride and self-control. It was three o’goddam-clock in the fucking morning and he was supposed to be furious. Instead he was choking down the panic rising suddenly from the bottom of his stomach. “Not dead,” he whispered. He didn’t even care how pathetic it sounded. “Not dead.” 

Sherlock’s arms tightened around him. A mouth in his hair, at the crown of his head. 

“John,” he rasped. “I…I lied because—”John couldn’t stop the hysterical giggle that bubbled out of him, stopping Sherlock’s words. It was ridiculous that Sherlock would think John needed an explanation. That _now_ , after three years, John would even bother to give a shit about excuses if he could. As if Sherlock hadn’t always been the one thing, in all of John’s crazy, insane, unbalanced existence, that made perfect sense. He raised his head from the last safe place on earth and saw over Sherlock’s shoulder that the clock still said three o’five. Not thirty seconds had gone by. He looked up at Sherlock. 

“And who do you think _I_ am?” John asked, trying not to grin like an idiot because it was inappropriate. Sherlock frowned. 

“What?” 

No time, no time, and things they needed to be making up for. 

“I’m not stupid Sherlock.” John was shoving Sherlock’s coat from his shoulder. It crumpled to the ground. John pulled the scarf away and kissed Sherlock’s exposed neck. “I’m a doctor. I can google.” He was pulling on Sherlock’s shirt out of his trousers and working his way through the buttons from the top to the bottom. Sherlock’s throat was at eye level and John watched the ripple of a swallow move through his skin. “You think I couldn’t tell the difference between a sociopath and a frightened young man?” 

Irritation flashed through Sherlock’s eyes. 

“For someone who isn’t stupid you certainly do an excellent impression of an imbecile,” he snapped. It only made John smile and Sherlock didn’t do anything to stop the wandering of John’s hands. It was too late for Sherlock to try and scare John away now. 

He slipped his palm up Sherlock’s bare chest and rose with it to say against Sherlock’s lips: “And for someone who thinks he isn’t really Sherlock Holmes you sure do act a lot like him.” John kissed him. Sherlock’s hands came back up to John’s face. He sucked John’s bottom lip into his mouth, ran his tongue along its inside, and let it go again. The wounded anger had left his face, replaced by confusion.

“If you knew,” he asked, gray eyes searching John’s face like it was a roadmap to the answer, “If you knew I wasn’t really—” 

John smiled. “A higher functioning arsehole?” 

“why did you never—” 

“Call you out on it? Punch you in the stupid face and then snog you silly?” 

Sherlock shrugged. John sat back on his heels. 

“I figured a genius like you must have his reasons,” he answered seriously. Did they _really_ have time for this? Was it _really_ necessary? “I don’t know what happened to you before we met but I know what happened to me.” Bullets and sand. “I’ve got big, scary secrets of my own, Sherlock. I’ve got shit that scares me so bad I’ve wet the bed. I know all about lying for self-preservation and lying to other people just so you can keep lying to yourself.” 

Sherlock was leaning over the back of the couch, working John’s tee over his head. His pupils were blown wide as bullet holes. John lifted his arms and cooperated, for a moment his vision was obscured, but when he could see again Sherlock was close, staring at John’s mouth. 

“Oh,” was all he said. 

John needed Sherlock to be on his side of the couch _right away_ , but somehow that relocation seemed like some impossible brain-teaser. John shucked his trousers himself and lay down with his head on the armrest. 

“Come here,” he said. Sherlock was the genius, let him figure it out. 

Sherlock walked around the couch— _oh right_ —and knelt with his knees on either side of John’s thighs. 

“I’m out of practice,” he murmured, questing fingers trailing down John’s chest and stomach. John closed his eyes and inhaled. 

Three o’nine. They were probably almost out of time. _What time?_

Sherlock’s hand trailed lower, fingers tracing over John’s erection. 

“So am I,” John gasped. He gripped the cushions under his back and beside his head. “Sherlock.” 

Sherlock bent down and sucked a bruise into John’s collarbone, working his hand beneath the fabric of John’s boxers. 

Three ten. 

“I’m sorry, John.” Sherlock whispered and wrapped his hand around John’s cock, squeezing gently. He shifted forward and stole the moan right out of John’s mouth, scooping it out with his tongue and _out of practice my ass_. John couldn’t even remember what Sherlock was apologizing for. 

Three ten. 

Sherlock’s hand twisted and the friction was perfect. John let go of the couch to hold onto Sherlock arms instead. 

John remembered dimly that Sherlock was apologizing for leaving John to mourn alone for three years. For or depriving them both of all _this_ the first time around. For coming back at all and being the kind of man who needed second chances. 

“Oh please,” John breathed. “Like they weren’t the worst three years of your life too.” 

Sherlock’s mouth, against John’s lips, tilted up on one side into a crooked smile. 

Three eleven

_Why am I counting?_

***

If they had really been Sherlock Holmes and John Watson this first reunion would have gone very differently. Because Sherlock Holmes was a heartless machine who worked with statistics and necessary evils and didn’t see the point of helpless remorse and John Watson was an altruistic humanist with a quick temper and a quicker fist. Sherlock Holmes would have walked through the back door and said “Hello, John.” And John Watson would have risen calmly from the couch and decked Sherlock Holmes in the face. He wouldn’t have bothered to avoid anything and Holmes’ _welcome home_ would have been a broken nose.

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would have stood in the kitchen, with a pile of bloody paper towels on the counter and a boiling kettle, while Holmes explained what had happened and Watson explained what _should_ have happened in a perfect, fair world. 

They would have bickered. Hollered. And then fallen silently back into their partnership. And three years of separation would have been bridged in thirty minutes. 

Sherlock and John were not these people. They were other people. Not storybook archetypes, but two men who’d been heart-sick and then heart broken and now they had to spend the rest of their lives patching up all the mistakes between them. The lives of Sherlock and John were much more complicated than the stories of Holmes and Watson. 

Instead of coming back together as two men remade, they were struggling back together as two burn victims crawling out of opposite sides of the same fire. And instead of finding their first breaths of fresh air, they were grateful to choke down even the ash and the smoke. Instead of safe and painless at last, they were feeling the slow regrowth of the nerves in their skin, and it hurt like hell. 

John’s mouth tasted like mint, and coffee. His chest tasted faintly of soap and cotton. 

The sounds he made tasted like warm honey. 

Sherlock hadn’t been lying, it had been years since he’d touched another person with the intention of giving pleasure. However, he had a better than basic understanding of the human anatomy and a full stock of sharp memories of a post coital John coming through the door to pull from. He pushed John’s boxers down to his knees to give himself more room to work and he dug his teeth into the places he’d observed to have faint bruises when John came home fro a successful date. 

He measured his pace by the urgency of John’s incoherent muttering. It was obvious that words like _Jesus_ , and _fuck_ , were good signs. And the cadence of Sherlock’s name seemed to be the equivalent of _please_ and _don’t stop._

The motions were all easy enough, John arching his back and writhing below him, Sherlock stroked and pulled on John’s cock, ran his knuckle along the underside of John’s testicles. John bucked and held on to Sherlock like he was hanging over a high edge. 

“John,” Sherlock heard himself whisper. And he realized that some part of him must have been Sherlock Holmes after all, because the thing he meant to say turned into “Look at me.” John did, mouth open and eyes wide, sweat starting to shine on his chest. 

“I know,” John mumbled around a groan and Sherlock had to shut his eyes for a moment to keep himself together. Because John, slowly coming apart, shivering and naked, John who should have been furious and wallowing in betrayal, was lying on his back and trusting Sherlock to break him into bits and was still listening closely enough to hear what was actually being said. What Sherlock couldn’t bring himself to say. And then John, _John_ , a man no less selfish than his neighbors and used infinitely more poorly by those who should know better, still took the time to say _I know_. Still had the kindness and the courage and the presence of mind to mean: _I love you too_. 

On the day Sherlock was buried, John had asked him for a miracle. But in the end, John brought the miracle. 

_You were the best man, and the most human…_

“Oh,” John was whispering, his thumbs rubbing circles on Sherlock’s arms through his shirt sleeves. Despite the immediacy of John’s voice and the intoxicating feeling of John’s body, Sherlock found himself strung like a wire between two moments. John, struggling for air here on the couch, and John struggling for words in the cemetery. 

_…no one will ever convince me that you told me a lie_. 

Not, Sherlock realized, out of blind loyalty. But because he known the real lies already. 

John had known all along. John had always known. 

Chest heaving, legs trembling, still looking into Sherlock’s eyes like he was waiting for permission, John gasped, “God,” and “Sherlock” like they were one word. Sherlock leaned close, tightened the hold of his fist and the rhythm of his jerks. 

_I owe you so much_. John’s plea or Sherlock’s promise? 

“I’m here,” Sherlock said. And John broke eye contact, threw his head back, and came with a cry. 

A few moments later, Sherlock still half lost in the revelation of his own idiocy, John smiled with his entire face and slipped lower on the couch, hoisting Sherlock’s hips forward. Sherlock wobbled and caught himself on the headrest. 

“John,” he started to ask, but then John’s mouth, wet and hot as hell, was mouthing Sherlock’s cock through his trousers. 

John dug Sherlock’s erection out and sucked it down. Suddenly, whatever Sherlock had been thinking so deeply about didn’t seem so important. He threaded his fingers in John’s hair and lost track of his own tongue in favor of cataloging the path of John’s. 

John swirled his tongue around the head of Sherlock’s erection and circled his hand around the base. He pulled until Sherlock, panting, toppled gratefully over the edge after him. 

Sherlock collapsed, exhausted and at the end of his tether. The room spun but John’s hands on his hips were steading.

“Up,” John laughed. “You weigh a ton.” Sherlock pushed himself to the other side of the couch on shaking arms so John could sit up. A brief look of consternation passed over John’s face and he asked, “Are you staying?” 

“I’d like to,” Sherlock answered. His voice was hoarse. 

“Tea?” John asked. 

“Please.” 

They wandered, half dressed (or in John’s case stark naked) into the kitchen and boiled a kettle. And then they had the conversation Sherlock Holmes and John Watson would have finished forty minutes ago. And they bickered, but didn’t holler, and Sherlock didn’t quite make it all the way through his explanation. He lost the thread between India and his last return to London. 

“What happened to Moran?” John asked when the narrative fell apart. 

“He’s dead.” 

“His bullet had my name on it?” John asked. Sherlock nodded. “How’d you kill him?”

“I shot him in his sleep.” said Sherlock. 

“Mmm,” said John. “I’m strangely okay with that.” 

At five o’ two they stumbled to John’s bedroom together and slept on the one-man mattress in a tangle. They dozed right through the morning and into the afternoon until the sound of John’s mobile buzzing itself off the nightstand woke them up. John grumble a string a ludicrous threats into Sherlock’s shoulder and slumped over him to pick it up. 

“What?” he snapped. 

Sherlock sighed while John frowned and listened to the voice on the other end, ran his hands down John’s ribs and up his back. Back down again and a little lower. He craned his neck to mouth at John’s shoulder. 

John, grinning, swatted him away. And then pulling away and rolling out bed, he handed Sherlock the phone. 

“It’s Lestrade,” he said with a dangerous glint in his eye. “They found that famous lawyer dead in his bed.” Sherlock took the phone slowly. “I think he wants your opinion.” 

Sherlock looked down at the string of numbers on the display that did, indeed, belong to Inspector Lestrade. 

“Suicide,” said Sherlock distantly, automatically, because he knew he hadn’t left any loose ends. “How did he know—”

“That you’re alive?” John asked. He was padding to the hallway, his hair a charming combination of well-slept and jolly-well-fucked. He stopped at the doorway to look over his shoulder and wrinkled his nose in the same way he’d always done when he was trying not to laugh. “Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective, is back in London?” he mocked. “Word gets around.” John vanished around the corner but his voice came drifting back. “It was probably that gossipy blogger of his that let it slip. I’m taking a shower.”

***

The last of Sherlock’s secrets was that he didn’t want to have any secrets. Not anymore.

And maybe, that he was pathetically and hopelessly in love with John. Of course, if even John had known it all along then there was a chance it had never been a secret, but rather, scribbled across his face. Graffitied along the faded track marks on his arms. Painted in swaths across the background of his insults and carved into the black stone that bore his name. 

Whispered and written like the final pages of some painfully obvious mystery novel. 

The one you had only just begun when you figured out the ending. Page one. Paragraph one. First line.

>   
> _It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished._  
> 


End file.
